In the U.S., some restaurants and medical supply stores are turning to drones to deliver food, medicine, and other essential goods to people’s homes. VOA’s Julie Taboh has more.
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The Kremlin’s clampdown on news of the war in Ukraine has hackers and volunteers from around the world are sending messages directly to Russian citizens’ phones to keep them informed. Matt Dibble has the story.
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China has connected a high-speed, multimillion-dollar, 15,000-kilometer undersea cable to Kenya, as Beijing advances what’s been dubbed its “digital silk road,” and Africa seeks the infrastructure it badly needs for better internet connectivity.  

Chinese giant Huawei is a shareholder in the $425-million PEACE cable, which stands for “Pakistan and East Africa Connecting Europe.” It stretches from Asia to Africa and then into France, where it terminates. 

It reached the coastal city of Mombasa on Tuesday, with the CEO of local partner company Telekom Kenya, Mugo Kibati, saying the cable would help meet the sharp rise in demand for internet services on a continent where internet adoption has trailed the rest of the world, but which is home to a growing, young and increasingly digital population.   

“This ultra-high-capacity cable will assist Kenya and the region in meeting its current and future broadband capacity requirements, bolster redundancy, minimize transit time of our country’s connectivity to Asia and Europe, as well as assist carriers in providing affordable services to Kenyans,” said Kibati.  

Business development

For his part, the PEACE Cable’s COO, Sun Xiaohua, said in a statement that the new infrastructure would “bring more business development to this region.” From Kenya, the cable will later be extended further down the continent’s east coast to South Africa. 

 

It’s estimated that 95% of international data flows via submarine cables, and in terms of Africa, China dominates, with the most projects aimed at connecting the continent. Aside from the PEACE cable, China’s proposed 2Africa cable will become one of the biggest undersea projects in the world when it goes live in 2024. 

 

But China’s massive digital infrastructure investments in Africa and elsewhere have not been without controversy, and Washington has expressed deep concerns that Beijing is attempting to monopolize networks and possibly use them for espionage.  

Safety concerns

Some analysts are concerned the technology could be misused by authoritarian leaders on the continent, but Cobus van Staden, a senior China-Africa researcher at the South African Institute of International Affairs, said most Africans simply want better internet. 

“I think this PEACE Cable generally plays very positively in Africa. Obviously, the United States has raised … concerns around this, particularly in relation to security, but I think for lot of African countries, the security issue is actually balanced by the wider issue of a lack of connectivity,” van Staden told VOA.  

Huawei was sanctioned by the U.S. under former president Donald Trump, but the company has built about 70% of Africa’s 4G networks, and van Staden said it seems China is winning the race for digital soft power on the continent. 

“I think there’s a space there for competition, but Western actors will have to step up,” he said.  
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Up to 40% of food in the U.S. is discarded. But as VOA’s Julie Taboh reports, a company in the Netherlands has come up with technology that can help reduce food waste in industrial kitchens.

Camera: Tina Trinh, Orbisk;         
Produced by Julie Taboh, Adam Greenbaum
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Negotiators from the European Parliament and EU member states agreed Thursday on a landmark law to curb the market dominance of U.S. big tech giants such as Google, Meta, Amazon and Apple.

Meeting in Brussels, the lawmakers nailed down a long list of do’s and don’ts that will single out the world’s most iconic web giants as internet “gatekeepers” subject to special rules.

The Digital Markets Act (DMA) has sped through the bloc’s legislative procedures and is designed to protect consumers and give rivals a better chance to survive against the world’s powerful tech juggernauts.

“The agreement ushers in a new era of tech regulation worldwide,” said German MEP Andreas Schwab, who led the negotiations for the European Parliament.

“The Digital Markets Act puts an end to the ever-increasing dominance of Big Tech companies,” he added.

The main point of the law is to avert the years of procedures and court battles needed to punish Big Tech’s monopolistic behavior in which cases can end with huge fines but little change in how the giants do business.

Once implemented, the law will give Brussels unprecedented authority to keep an eye on decisions by the giants, especially when they pull out the checkbook to buy up promising startups.

“The gatekeepers – they now have to take responsibility,” said the EU’s competition supremo Margrethe Vestager.

“A number of things they can do, a number of things they can’t do, and that of course gives everyone a fair chance,” she added.

‘Concrete impacts’

The law contains about 20 rules that in many cases target practices by Big Tech that have gone against the bloc’s rules on competition, but which Brussels has struggled to enforce.

The DMA imposes myriad obligations on Big Tech, including forcing Apple to open up its App Store to alternative payment systems, a demand that the iPhone maker has opposed fiercely, most notably in its feud with Epic games, the maker of Fortnite.

Google will be asked to clearly offer users of Android-run smartphones alternatives to its search engine, the Google Maps app or its Chrome browser.

A Google spokesperson told AFP that the US internet giant will “take time to study the final text and work with regulators to implement it.”

“While we support many of the DMA’s ambitions around consumer choice and interoperability, we remain concerned that some of the rules could reduce innovation and the choice available to Europeans,” the spokesperson said.

Apple would also be forced to loosen its grip on the iPhone, with users allowed to uninstall its Safari web browser and other company-imposed apps that users cannot currently delete.

In a statement, Apple swiftly expressed regret over the law, saying it was “concerned that some provisions of the DMA will create unnecessary privacy and security vulnerabilities for our users.”

After a furious campaign by influential MEPs, the law also forces messaging services such as Meta-owned WhatsApp to make themselves available to users on other services such as Signal or Apple’s iMessage, and vice versa.

France, which holds the EU presidency and negotiated on behalf of the bloc’s 27 member states, said the law would deliver “concrete impacts on the lives of European citizens.”

“We are talking about the goods you buy online, the smartphone you use every day, and the services you use every day,” said France’s digital affairs minister, Cedric O.

Stiff fines

Violation of the rules could lead to fines as high as 10% of a company’s annual global sales and even 20% for repeat offenders.

The DMA “will have a profound impact on the way some gatekeepers’ operations are currently conducted,” said lawyer Katrin Schallenberg, a partner at Clifford Chance.

“Clearly, companies affected … are already working on ways to comply with or even challenge the regulation,” she added.

The Big Tech companies have lobbied hard against the new rules and the firms have been defended in Washington, where it is alleged that the new law unfairly targets U.S. companies.

With the deal now reached by negotiators, the DMA now faces final votes in a full session of the European Parliament as well as by ministers from the EU’s 27 member states.

The rules could come into place starting Jan. 1, 2023, though tech companies are asking for more time to implement the law.
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U.S. and British officials on Thursday accused the Russian government of running a yearslong campaign to hack into critical infrastructure, including an American nuclear plant and a Saudi oil refinery.

The announcement was paired with the unsealing of criminal charges against four Russian government officials, whom the U.S. Department of Justice accused of carrying out two major hacking operations aimed at the global energy sector. Thousands of computers in 135 countries were affected between 2012 and 2018, U.S. prosecutors said.

Cybersecurity analysts described the moves as a shot across the bow to Moscow after U.S. President Joe Biden had warned just days ago about “evolving intelligence” that the Russian government might be preparing cyberattacks against American targets.

John Hultquist, whose firm Mandiant investigated the Saudi refinery hack, said that by making the criminal charges public, the United States “let them know that we know who they are.”

In one of the two indictments unsealed on Thursday and dated June 2021, the Justice Department accused Evgeny Viktorovich Gladkikh, a 36-year-old Russian Ministry of Defense research institute employee, of conspiring with others between May and September 2017 to hack the systems of a foreign refinery and install malware known as “Triton” on a safety system produced by Schneider Electric SE.

The refinery wasn’t named, but the British government said it was in Saudi Arabia and had previously been identified as the Petro Rabigh refinery complex on the Red Sea coast.

In a second indictment, dated August 2021, the Justice Department said three other suspected hackers from Russia’s Federal Security Service (FSB) carried out cyberattacks on the computer networks of oil and gas firms, nuclear power plants, and utility and power transmission companies between 2012 and 2017 — a campaign researchers have long attributed to a group sometimes dubbed “Energetic Bear” or “Berserk Bear.”

The Russian Embassy in Washington did not immediately return a message seeking comment.

The three accused Russians in the second case are Pavel Aleksandrovich Akulov, 36, Mikhail Mikhailovich Gavrilov, 42, and Marat Valeryevich Tyukov, 39. None of the four defendants have been arrested, a U.S. official said.

Britain’s Foreign Office said that the FSB hackers targeted the systems controlling the Wolf Creek nuclear plant in Kansas “but failed to have any negative impact.”

“Russia’s targeting of critical national infrastructure is calculated and dangerous,” British Foreign Secretary Liz Truss said in a statement. She said it showed Russian President Vladimir Putin “is prepared to risk lives to sow division and confusion among allies.”

A Justice Department official told reporters that even though the hacking at issue in the two cases occurred years ago, investigators remained concerned Russia will carry out similar attacks in future.

“These charges show the dark art of the possible when it comes to critical infrastructure,” the official said.

The official added that the department decided to unseal the indictments because they determined the “benefit of revealing the results of the investigation now outweighs the likelihood of arrests in the future.”

The 2017 Saudi refinery attack stunned the cybersecurity community when it was made public by researchers later that year. Unlike typical digital intrusions aimed at stealing data or holding it for ransom, the attack appeared aimed at causing physical damage to the facility itself by disabling its safety system. U.S. officials have been tracking the case ever since.

In 2019, those behind Triton were reported to be scanning and probing at least 20 electric utilities in the United States for vulnerabilities.

Two weeks before the 2020 U.S. presidential election, the U.S. Treasury Department imposed sanctions on the Russian government-backed Central Scientific Research Institute of Chemistry and Mechanics. Prosecutors believe Gladkikh worked there. On Thursday, British officials also announced sanctions on the institute.

The Foreign Office said FSB hackers had targeted British energy companies and had successfully stolen data from the U.S. aviation sector. It also accused the hackers of trying to compromise an employee of Mikhail Khodorkovsky, a former oil tycoon who fell afoul of the Kremlin and now lives in London. 
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Seattle-based teenager Avi Schiffmann is doing what he can to help Ukrainian refugees. He has launched a website that helps refugees find safe places to stay, matching refugees with people willing to share their homes. Anush Avetisyan has the story, narrated by Anna Rice.
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Okta whose authentication services are used by companies including Fedex and Moody’s to provide access to their networks, said on Tuesday that it had been hit by hackers and that some customers may have been affected.

The scope of the breach is still unclear, but it could have major consequences because thousands of companies rely on San Francisco-based Okta to manage access to their networks and applications.

Chief Security Officer David Bradbury said in a blog post that the computer of a customer support engineer working for a third-party contractor was accessed by the hackers for a five-day period in mid-January and that “the potential impact to Okta customers is limited to the access that support engineers have.”

“There are no corrective actions that need to be taken by our customers,” he said.

Nevertheless, Bradbury acknowledged that support engineers were able to help reset passwords and that some customers “may have been impacted.” He said the company was in the process of identifying and contacting them.

The nature of that impact wasn’t clear, and Okta did not immediately respond to an email asking how many organizations were potentially affected or how that squared with Okta’s advice that customers did not need to take corrective action.

On its website, Okta describes itself as the “identity provider for the internet” and says it has more than 15,000 customers on its platform.

It competes with the likes of Microsoft, PingID, Duo, SecureAuth and IBM to provide identity services such as single sign-on and multifactor authentication used to help users securely access online applications and websites.

Okta’s statement follows the posting of a series of screenshots of Okta’s internal communications by a group of ransom-seeking hackers known as Lapsus$ on their Telegram channel late on Monday.

In an accompanying message, the group said its focus was “ONLY on Okta customers.”

Lapsus$ responded to Okta’s statement on Tuesday by saying the company was trying to minimize the importance of the breach.

Some outside observers weren’t impressed with Okta’s explanation either.

Dan Tentler, the founder of cybersecurity consultancy Phobos Group, earlier told Reuters that Okta customers should “be very vigilant right now.”

There were signs that Okta customers were taking action to revisit their security.

Web infrastructure company Cloudflare issued a detailed explanation  of how it reacted to the Okta breach and saying the company did not believe it had been compromised as a result.

FedEx said in a statement that it too was investigating and “we currently have no indication that our environment has been accessed or compromised.” Moody’s did not return a message seeking comment.

Lapsus$ is a relatively new entrant to the crowded ransomware field but has made waves with high-profile hacks and attention-seeking behavior.

The group compromised the websites of Portuguese media conglomerate Impresa earlier this year, tweeting the phrase “Lapsus$ is now the new president of Portugal” from one newspaper’s Twitter accounts. The Impresa-owned media outlets described the hack as an assault on press freedom.

Last month, the group leaked proprietary information about U.S. chipmaker Nvidia to the Web.

More recently the group has purported to have leaked source code from several big tech firms, including Microsoft. In a blog post published Tuesday and devoted to Lapsus$, the software firm confirmed that one of its accounts had been compromised, “gaining limited access.”

The hackers did not respond to a message left on their Telegram group chat seeking comment.

 
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Three companies have lodged a complaint with the European Commission against Microsoft, accusing the U.S. technology giant of anti-competitive practices in its cloud services, sources told AFP on Saturday, confirming media reports.

Microsoft is “undermining fair competition and limiting the choice of consumers” in the computing cloud services market, said one of the three, French company OVHcloud, in a statement to AFP.

The companies complain that under certain clauses in Microsoft’s licensing contracts for Office 365 services, tariffs are higher when the software is not run on Azure cloud infrastructure, which is owned by the U.S. group.

They also say the user experience is worse and that there are incompatibilities with certain other Microsoft products when not running on Azure. 

In a statement to AFP, Microsoft said, “European cloud service providers have built successful business models on Microsoft software and services” and had many options on how to use that software.

“We continually evaluate how best to support all of our partners and make Microsoft software available to all customers in all environments, including those with other cloud service providers,” it continued.

The complaint, first reported this week by The Wall Street Journal, was lodged last summer with the EU Commission’s competition authority.

Microsoft is also the subject of an earlier 2021 complaint to the European Commission by a different set of companies led by the German Nextcloud.

It denounced the “ever-stronger integration” of Microsoft’s cloud services, which it said complicated the development of competing offers.

Microsoft has already been heavily fined multiple times by Brussels for anti-competitive practices regarding its Internet Explorer browser, Windows operating system and software licensing rules. 
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Before Russia invaded Ukraine, the groundwork had already begun — online. Russian disinformation is a key part of what many are calling a hybrid war.  VOA’s Tina Trinh explains.
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Facebook owner Meta Platforms FB.O will help train Australian political candidates on aspects of cyber security and coach influencers to stop the spread of misinformation in a bid to boost the integrity of an upcoming election, it said on Tuesday.

Australia has not yet set a date for its next election, which is due by May. Authorities are already on high alert for electoral interference, having previously highlighted foreign interference attempts aimed at all levels of government and targeting both sides of politics.

“We’ll stay vigilant to emerging threats and take additional steps, if necessary, to prevent abuse on our platform while also empowering people in Australia to use their voice by voting,” Josh Machin, the company’s Australian chief of public policy, said in a statement that is to be posted online.

The social media giant added that it had drafted in a university to help with fact-checking operations in Australia and would require disclosure of the names of those paying for election-related advertisements, in what it called its most comprehensive election strategy.

The steps show how social media firms are seeking to combat online distortion and abuse of information during the lead-up to an election, a time when such efforts are typically at their most heated.

The Facebook Protect security program for high-profile individuals launched in Australia in December, with the company vowing to work with election officials and political parties to offer training for candidates on its policies and tools and ways to keep safe.

To avert hacking, it will prompt candidates to upgrade security to two-factor authentication. The company said it would also coach influencers, or those who earn advertising income from online commentary, to spot fake news.

People seeking to run election-related ads will need to furnish government-issued identification, as well as mandatory disclosures of funding sources for them, it said.

Ads by unauthorized parties, without funding disclosure, would be taken down and stored in a public archive for seven years, it added.

RMIT University, which joined Meta’s third-party fact-checking effort, said it would review posts the company identified as potential misinformation and try to verify them via interviews with primary sources and checks of public data.

“A continuing focus of our work is to identify the super spreaders of misinformation and the ecosystems in which they operate,” said RMIT FactLab Director Russell Skelton in a statement. “High impact misinformation disrupts evidence-based public policy and debate and so it is crucial we gain a better understanding of what drives this.” 
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For many Ukrainians, staying online has been daunting as Russia attacks telecoms and power supplies, but some people, like Oleg Kutkov, a software and communications engineer, are testing out a new way to stay connected.

In a FaceTime interview with VOA Mandarin from Kyiv, Kutkov held up the components of the two-part terminal needed to connect via Starlink, an internet constellation of some 2,000 satellites operated by billionaire Elon Musk’s private firm SpaceX, one of a growing number of enterprises supporting Ukraine.

The Starlink dish and modem setup is easy to use, according to Kutkov, who is in his mid-30s.

“You just place the receptor outside, power on, wait a few minutes, and then you can go online without any additional tuning,” he told VOA Mandarin on Monday.

Kutkov said, “Our government is communicating with citizens using social (media) channels, and we are getting all the information from them on the internet. Not from TV or radio, but the internet. So [having connectivity] is very important.”

Skylink arrived in Ukraine with next-generation speed. On Feb. 26, Mykhailo Fedorov, Ukraine’s vice prime minister and minister of digital transformation, tweeted to Musk, “while you try to colonize Mars — Russia try to occupy Ukraine! While your rockets successfully land from space — Russian rockets attack Ukrainian civil people! We ask you to provide Ukraine with Starlink stations and to address sane Russians to stand.”

Hours later, Musk tweeted that Ukraine would soon have Starlink service and despite criticism that he was using the crisis as a marketing stunt, the hardware began arriving there on Feb. 28.

Fedorov tweeted on March 9 that a second shipment of Starlink equipment had arrived as the situation in Ukraine continued to deteriorate.

According to NetBlocks, a London-based organization tracking internet outages around the world, several major cities in southern Ukraine, including Kherson and Mariupol, have experienced severe internet disruption due to attacks on infrastructure and power supplies.

In other areas, including Kharkiv and Kyiv, internet connections were disrupted as Russian troops launched cyber assaults targeting financial and government websites in Ukraine.

And even though Musk has cautioned the Skylink connection is being used by Russia to target users, Kutkov has been sharing his experiences with the service on Twitter. He told VOA Mandarin that he has received requests for support from across the country, including from ordinary citizens, companies and even those in the military.

“Ukraine is a highly digitized country,” Kutlov said. “We have everything online.”

SpaceX is one of a growing number of private companies that began taking an active role in supporting Ukraine in the fight against Russia almost as soon as Russia began missile and artillery attacks on Feb. 24.

Mobile phone carriers including T-Mobile, AT&T and Verizon have waived charges for calls and texts to and from Ukraine.

Tesla is allowing any electric vehicles to use its charging stations along the borders of Ukraine with Poland and Hungary.

Airbnb, the online marketplace for lodging, stepped up to organize free short-term accommodation for 100,000 refugees from Ukraine.

Google and Facebook have banned Russian state media from their European platforms while working with European governments to combat the spread of disinformation from the Kremlin. Twitter began labeling all tweets containing content from Russian state-affiliated media outlets on Feb. 28.

As of Friday, more than 340 companies have announced their withdrawal from Russia’s economy in protest of Putin’s invasion of Ukraine, according to the Yale School of Management.

Russia has threatened to counter that exodus by nationalizing foreign-owned businesses that have decided to flee the country in response to the invasion of Ukraine.

Eli Dourado, a senior research fellow at the Center for Growth and Opportunity at Utah State University, told VOA Mandarin the reason that so many private companies have taken action is that Russia’s invasion has “shocked and disgusted much of the world.”

He said the circumstances of the conflict have left a lot of people feeling that “it’s almost pure good versus evil.”

Abishur Prakash, co-founder and geopolitical futurist at the Center for Innovating the Future, a Toronto-based advisory firm, said one of the reasons Western corporations, especially tech companies, are taking sides is “because the global landscape has now permanently shifted.”

“The West is trying to permanently decouple from Russia, and Western tech firms are more than complying,” said Prakash, author of The World Is Vertical: How Technology Is Remaking Globalization, in an emailed response to VOA Mandarin. “There is a tacit acceptance in the boardrooms of technology companies that Russia has become ‘off limits.'”
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From the three-light traffic signal, refrigerated trucks, automatic elevator doors, color monitors for desktop computers, to the shape of the modern ironing board, the clothes wringer, blood banks, laser treatment for cataracts, home security systems and the super-soaker children’s toy, many objects and services Americans use every day were invented by Black men and women.

These innovators were recognized for their inventions, but countless other inventors of color have gone largely unrecognized. Others are completely lost to history.

“There were some instances where Black inventors would compete with Alexander Graham Bell, with Thomas Edison, where their inventions were really just as good and just as transformative, but they just did not have access to the capital,” says Shontavia Johnson, an entrepreneur and associate vice president for entrepreneurship and innovation at Clemson University in South Carolina. “They did not have access to all these different systems that the United States puts in place to support inventors.”

Thomas Edison is credited with inventing the lightbulb, but it was Lewis Latimer, the son of formerly enslaved people, who patented a new filament that extended the lifespan of lightbulbs so they wouldn’t die out after a few days. Latimer got a patent for his invention in 1882, something countless Black innovators in the generations before him were unable to do.

Free Black citizens could obtain patents from the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office, but enslaved Black people could not. Slavery wasn’t abolished until 1865, with the adoption of the 13th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution. Prior to that, the inventions of Black innovators were often claimed by their enslavers or other white people.

Modern-day research suggests that was the case with the technology behind the cotton gin — a device that separated cotton seeds from their fibers. It was largely innovated by enslaved Black people, but a white man named Eli Whitney obtained the patent for the invention.

“We often count our country as being this place where innovation and entrepreneurship thrive,” Johnson says. “But when you completely exclude a group of people from access to the patent system, … exploiting their invention, then the natural result of that is, you look at the most important inventors and innovators in American history … and they pretty much are your stereotypical white male inventor, not because other people have not been innovative, too, it’s just these folks have been excluded from the patent system.”

This deliberate early exclusion of Black inventors from the patent system and, in large part, the pantheon of great American inventors, was rooted in racist assumptions about the intellectual inferiority of Black people, according to Rayvon Fouché, a professor of American studies at Purdue University in Lafayette, Indiana.

“Invention was seen as this God-given ability. So, as you can imagine, all the perceptions, ideas about masculinity, maleness, power [and] authority are all wrapped into this vision of inventiveness,” says Fouché, who also leads the National Science Foundation’s Social and Economic Sciences Division. “The inherent understanding of what an inventor is and was and could be — the framing of that term — eliminated the possibility for all Black folks and all marginalized people.”

Other barriers Black inventors historically faced included less access to equal education, systematic exclusion from professional scientific and engineering

societies, limited access to wealthy investors and mainstream banks for start-up capital to commercialize their inventions, and racial violence.

Black inventors were also less involved in patenting activity between 1870 and 1940, during times of lynchings, race riots and segregation laws in the United States.

There were also the Black creators who came up with innovations that didn’t necessarily fit the traditional ideas of inventiveness.

“For much of our history, when we think about the word ‘invention,’ it’s sort of freighted with these white, Eurocentric notions of what that means,” says Eric Hintz, a historian with the Lemelson Center for the Study of Invention and Innovation at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History. “Often, the traditional definition of ‘invention’ is something like a machine that saves human labor or animal labor, that does some task more efficiently.”

That kept certain innovations by Black people from being recognized by the patent system.

“[The patent system] is built on this model that basically assumes innovation is desirable when it’s tied to commercial benefit. But if it is rooted in community survival or the needs of society, that is not worthy of protection, and we see that in the law,” Johnson says. “There are certain types of things that are patentable, and certain things that are not patentable, and that is a distinction that I do think leaves a lot of people out of the ecosystem.”

A New York DJ known as Grandmaster Flash pioneered the use of record turntables as an instrument by using his fingers to manipulate the sounds backward and forward or to slow it down. He had an innovative style of mixing records and blending beats that pioneered the art of deejaying, but he holds no patents.

“Black people have been doing lots of creative, innovative things,” Fouché says. “We can think about all kinds of technological creative things within the context of hip-hop and music production and art in other ways. But of course, the patent office is driven by techno-scientific innovation. And I think part of it is, for me, to open up the conversation of what inventiveness is and can be.”

Museum collections have historically excluded the contributions of marginalized people, a failing the Smithsonian’s Lemelson Center readily acknowledges.

“Definitely the Smithsonian and other libraries and museums have been complicit over the decades, over the centuries, of privileging white inventors in the things that we collect,” says Hintz. “We have a ton of stuff on Edison and Tesla [electricity] and Steve Jobs [innovator of Apple products and devices] and whomever, but it’s incumbent on us now to make sure that we’re preserving the stories of Madam C.J. Walker, Grandmaster Flash, Lonnie Johnson — who invented the Super Soaker, of Patricia Bath, an ophthalmologist who invented a way of eradicating cataracts.”

Walker, America’s first self-made female millionaire, built her fortune with a line of hair care products for Black women. Black people also invented the clothes dryer, the automatic gear shift in vehicles, the modern toilet, lawn sprinkler, peanut butter and potato chips.

But the innovation gap persists. African Americans and women still participate at each stage of the innovation process at lower rates than their male and white counterparts.

“How do you get more Black kids, girls [and] marginalized people into these pathways that have been traditionally white, middle class and male?” Fouché says, emphasizing the importance of sparking children’s imaginations, despite any obstacles.

“I’m more interested in saying, ‘Well, what do you want to do? How do you want to change the world? What are the things that are meaningful to you?’ and just impressing upon people the limitless opportunities. … So, don’t limit the possibilities.”
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Facebook said Thursday that because of the invasion of Ukraine, it has temporarily eased its rules regarding violent speech.

Moscow’s internationally condemned invasion of its neighbor has provoked unprecedented sanctions from Western governments and businesses, but also a surge of online anger.

“As a result of the Russian invasion of Ukraine, we have temporarily made allowances for forms of political expression that would normally violate our rules like violent speech such as ‘death to the Russian invaders,'” Facebook’s parent company Meta said in a statement.

“We still won’t allow credible calls for violence against Russian civilians,” it added.

Facebook made its statement after a Reuters report, citing the firm’s emails to its content moderators, which said the policy applies to Armenia, Azerbaijan, Estonia, Georgia, Hungary, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, Romania, Russia, Slovakia and Ukraine.

Facebook and other U.S. tech giants have moved to penalize Russia for the attack on Ukraine, and Moscow has also moved to block access to the leading social media network as well as Twitter.

Russia thus joins the small club of countries barring the largest social network in the world, along with China and North Korea.

Since Moscow’s invasion of Ukraine last month, Russian authorities also have stepped up pressure against independent media.

Blocking of Facebook and restricting of Twitter last week came the same day Moscow backed the imposition of jail terms on media publishing “false information” about the military.

In this context, Facebook had played a key information distribution role in Russia, even as it endures withering criticism in the West over matters ranging from political division to teenagers’ mental health.

The war is, meanwhile, taking place during a period of unprecedented crackdown on the Russian opposition, with has included protest leaders being assassinated, jailed or forced out of the country.

Big U.S. tech firms like Apple and Microsoft have announced halting the sale of their products in Russia, while other companies have paused certain business activities or ties.

Ukrainian officials have been campaigning heavily for Russia to be cut off from everything from Netflix to Instagram. 
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Twitter says it has created a version of its microblogging service that can be used by Russians despite the regular version of the service being restricted in the country.

The service will be available via a special “onion” URL on the darkweb that is accessible only when using a Tor browser.

Onion URLs and Tor have long been used by those seeking to work around censorship as well as those who are involved in illegal activities on the darkweb.

The announcement of the new site was made by a software engineer who does work for Twitter.

“This is possibly the most important and long-awaited tweet that I’ve ever composed.

“On behalf of @Twitter, I am delighted to announce their new @TorProject onion service,” wrote Alec Muffett.
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A Ukrainian man charged last year with conducting one of the most severe ransomware attacks against U.S. targets has been extradited to the United States and made a court appearance Wednesday, the U.S. Justice Department said.

According to an August 2021 indictment, Yaroslav Vasinskyi accessed the internal computer networks of several victim companies and deployed Sodinokibi/REvil ransomware to encrypt the data on their computers, the Justice Department said in a statement.

Vasinskyi was allegedly responsible for the July 2021 ransomware attack against Florida software provider Kaseya, the department said.

Reuters could not reach a representative of Vasinskyi. Kaseya did not immediately return a message seeking comment.

The Ukrainian national was accused in the indictment of breaking into Kaseya over the July 4 weekend last year and simultaneously distributing with accomplices REvil ransomware to as many as 1,500 Kaseya customers, encrypting their data and forcing some to shut down for days, the Justice Department said.

While most of the 1,500 businesses paralyzed as a result around the globe faced limited concerns, the disruption was felt keenly in places such as Sweden, where hundreds of supermarkets had to close because their cash registers were inoperative, and New Zealand, where schools and kindergartens were knocked offline.

Vasinskyi was charged in the indictment with breaking into the victim companies and installing encryption software developed by the core REvil ransomware hacking group. REvil directly handled the ransom negotiations and split the profits with Vasinskyi and other affiliates. This model allowed the notorious ransomware gang to extort numerous companies for cryptocurrency.

Vasinskyi was arrested in Poland in October. The Justice Department charged him and a Russian late last year.

U.S. law enforcement authorities transported Vasinskyi to Dallas, Texas, where he arrived March 3, the Justice Department said Wednesday.

REvil was involved in an attack last year against top global meat processor JBS S.A.
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A bipartisan group of lawmakers has written a letter asking the Department of Justice to determine whether online retailer Amazon engaged in obstruction of Congress during an investigation of the company’s competitive practices. 

The letter said the company had “engaged in a pattern and practice of misleading conduct” that suggested it had sought to influence or obstruct an investigation into how it operates. 

The House Judiciary Committee conducted a 16-month probe into how Amazon, Apple, Google and Facebook operated. 

During the investigation, lawmakers focused on Amazon’s use of private-label products and collection of third-party data. 

Amazon allegedly copied popular products in India and then manipulated search results to increase the sales of its own products, Reuters reported. 

The committee’s letter to DOJ alleges Amazon made untrue or misleading statements when asked about those practices. It also said Amazon refused to provide evidence that would “either corroborate its claims or correct the record,” according to the 24-page letter. 

“It appears to have done so to conceal the truth about its use of third-party sellers’ data to advantage its private-label business and its preferencing of private-label products in search results — subjects of the Committee’s investigation,” according to the letter, which was signed by House Judiciary Committee Chair Jerrold Nadler, House Antitrust Subcommittee Chair David Cicilline, and Democratic and Republican committee members.  

“As a result, we have no choice but to refer this matter to the Department of Justice to investigate whether Amazon and its executives obstructed Congress in violation of applicable federal law,” the letter added. 

Amazon told CNBC that “there’s no factual basis for this, as demonstrated in the huge volume of information we’ve provided over several years of good faith cooperation with this investigation.” 

When Amazon founder Jeff Bezos testified to the committee in July 2020, he said the company prevents Amazon employees from using seller data but could not say it had never happened. 

Lawmakers said investigations by news organizations like Reuters and The Wall Street Journal contradicted Bezos’ testimony, as well as testimony of other Amazon employees. 

“Amazon attempted to clean up the inaccurate testimony through ever-shifting explanations of its internal policies and denials of the investigative reports,” the lawmakers said. “The committee uncovered evidence from former Amazon employees, and former and current sellers, that corroborated the reports’ claims.” 

“After Amazon was caught in a lie and repeated misrepresentations, it stonewalled the committee’s efforts to uncover the truth,” the letter said.  

Some information in this report came from The Associated Press and Reuters. 

 
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Russia’s blocking of Facebook is a symptom of its broader effort to cut itself off from sources of information that could imperil its internationally condemned invasion of Ukraine, experts say.

The often-criticized social network is part of a web of information sources that can challenge the Kremlin’s preferred perspective that its assault on Ukraine is righteous and necessary.

Blocking of Facebook and restricting of Twitter on Friday came the same day Moscow backed the imposition of jail terms on media publishing “false information” about the military.

Russia’s motivation “is to suppress political challenges at a very fraught moment for (Vladimir) Putin, and the regime, when it comes to those asking very tough questions about why Russia is continuing to prosecute this war,” said Steven Feldstein, a senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.

Russia thus joins the very small club of countries barring the largest social network in the world, along with China and North Korea.

Moscow was expected to quickly overpower its neighbor but the campaign has already shown signs that it could go longer and could lead to the unleashing of its full military ferocity.

“It’s a censorship tool of last resort,” Feldstein added. “They are pulling the plug on a platform rather than try to block pages or use all sorts of other mechanisms that they traditionally do.”

Earlier this week independent monitoring group OVD-Info said that more than 7,000 people in Russia had been detained at demonstrations over Moscow’s invasion of Ukraine.

Web monitoring group NetBlocks said Russia’s moves against the social media giants come amid a backdrop of protests “which are coordinated and mobilized through social media and messaging applications.”

The war is meanwhile taking place during a period of unprecedented crackdown on the Russian opposition, with has included protest leaders being assassinated, jailed or forced out of the country.

‘No access to truth’

Since Moscow’s invasion of Ukraine last week, Russian authorities have stepped up pressure against independent media even though press freedoms in the country were already rapidly waning.

In this context, Facebook plays a key information distribution role in Russia, even as it endures withering criticism in the West over matters ranging from political division to teenagers’ mental health.

Natalia Krapiva, tech legal counsel at rights group Access Now, said social media has been a place where independent, critical voices have been talking about the invasion.

“Facebook is one of the key platforms in Russia,” she said, adding that its loss is “a devastating blow to access to independent information and for resistance to the war.”

Russia has been hit with unprecedented sanctions from the West over the invasion, but also rejections both symbolic and significant from sources ranging from sporting organizations to U.S. tech companies.

Facebook’s parent Meta and Twitter however have engaged on the very sensitive issue of information by blocking the spread of Russian state-linked news media.

Russia’s media regulator took aim at both, with Roskomnadzor accusing Facebook of discrimination toward state media.

Big U.S. tech firms like Apple and Microsoft have announced halting the sale of their products in Russia, while other companies have made public their “pauses” of certain business activities or ties.

On Friday U.S. internet service provider Cogent Communications said it had “terminated its contracts with customers billing out of Russia.”

The Washington Post reported Cogent has “several dozen customers in Russia, with many of them, such as state-owned telecommunications giant Rostelecom, being close to the government.”

It’s exactly the kind of measure Ukrainian officials have been campaigning heavily for as they ask Russia be cut off from everything from Netflix to Instagram.

Yet experts like Krapiva worry about what that would mean for dissenting or critical voices inside Russia.

“There’s a risk of people having no access to truth,” she said.

“Some Ukrainians have been calling for disconnecting Russia from the internet, but that’s counterproductive to disconnect civil society in Russia who are trying to fight.”  
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Formed in a fury to counter Russia’s blitzkrieg attack, Ukraine’s hundreds-strong volunteer “hacker” corps is much more than a paramilitary cyberattack force in Europe’s first major war of the internet age. It is crucial to information combat and to crowdsourcing intelligence.

“We are really a swarm. A self-organizing swarm,” said Roman Zakharov, a 37-year-old IT executive at the center of Ukraine’s bootstrap digital army.

Inventions of the volunteer hackers range from software tools that let smartphone and computer owners anywhere participate in distributed denial-of-service attacks on official Russian websites to bots on the Telegram messaging platform that block disinformation, let people report Russian troop locations and offer instructions on assembling Molotov cocktails and basic first aid.

Zahkarov ran research at an automation startup before joining Ukraine’s digital self-defense corps. His group is StandForUkraine. Its ranks include software engineers, marketing managers, graphic designers and online ad buyers, he said.

The movement is global, drawing on IT professionals in the Ukrainian diaspora whose handiwork includes web defacements with antiwar messaging and graphic images of death and destruction in the hopes of mobilizing Russians against the invasion.

“Both our nations are scared of a single man — (Russian President Vladimir) Putin,” said Zakharov. “He’s just out of his mind.” Volunteers reach out person-to-person to Russians with phone calls, emails and text messages, he said, and send videos and pictures of dead soldiers from the invading force from virtual call centers.

Some build websites, such as a “site where Russian mothers can look through (photos of) captured Russian guys to find their sons,” Zakharov said by phone from Kyiv, the Ukrainian capital.

The cyber volunteers’ effectiveness is difficult to gauge. Russian government websites have been repeatedly knocked offline, if briefly, by the DDoS attacks, but generally weather them with countermeasures.

It’s impossible to say how much of the disruption — including more damaging hacks — is caused by freelancers working independently of but in solidarity with Ukrainian hackers.

A tool called “Liberator” lets anyone in the world with a digital device become part of a DDoS attack network, or botnet. The tool’s programmers code in new targets as priorities change.

But is it legal? Some analysts say it violates international cyber norms. Its Estonian developers say they acted “in coordination with the Ministry of Digital Transformation” of Ukraine.

A top Ukrainian cybersecurity official, Victor Zhora, insisted at his first online news conference of the war Friday that homegrown volunteers were attacking only what they deem military targets, in which he included the financial sector, Kremlin-controlled media and railways. He did not discuss specific targets.

Zakharov did. He said Russia’s banking sector was well fortified against attack but that some telecommunications networks and rail services were not. He said Ukrainian-organized cyberattacks had briefly interrupted rail ticket sales in western Russia around Rostov and Voronezh and knocked out telephone service for a time in the region of eastern Ukraine controlled by Russian-backed separatists since 2014. The claims could not be independently confirmed.

A group of Belarusian hacktivists calling themselves the Cyber Partisans also apparently disrupted rail service in neighboring Belarus this week seeking to frustrate transiting Russian troops. A spokeswoman said Friday that electronic ticket sales were still down after their malware attack froze up railway IT servers.

Over the weekend, Ukraine’s minister of digital transformation, Mykhailo Fedorov, announced the creation of an volunteer cyber army. The IT Army of Ukraine now counts 290,000 followers on Telegram.

Zhora, deputy chair of the state special communications service, said one job of Ukrainian volunteers is to obtain intelligence that can be used to attack Russian military systems.

Some cybersecurity experts have expressed concern that soliciting help from freelancers who violate cyber norms could have dangerous escalatory consequences. One shadowy group claimed to have hacked Russian satellites; Dmitry Rogozin, the director general of Russia’s space agency Roscosmos, called the claim false but was also quoted by the Interfax news agency as saying such a cyberattack would be considered an act of war.

Asked if he endorsed the kind of hostile hacking being done under the umbrella of the Anonymous hacktivist brand — which anyone can claim — Zhora said, “We do not welcome any illegal activity in cyberspace.”

“But the world order changed on the 24th of February,” he added, when Russia invaded.

The overall effort was spurred by the creation of a group called the Ukrainian Cyber Volunteers by a civilian cybersecurity executive, Yegor Aushev, in coordination with Ukraine’s Defense Ministry. Aushev said it numbers more than 1,000 volunteers.

On Friday, most of Ukraine’s telecommunications and internet were fully operational despite outages in areas captured by invading Russian forces, said Zhora. He reported about 10 hostile hijackings of local government websites in Ukraine to spread false propaganda saying Ukraine’s government had capitulated.

Zhora said presumed Russian hackers continued trying to spread destructive malware in targeted email attacks on Ukrainian officials and — in what he considers a new tactic — to infect the devices of individual citizens. Three instances of such malware were discovered in the runup to the invasion.

U.S. Cyber Command has been assisting Ukraine since well before the invasion. Ukraine does not have a dedicated military cyber unit. It was standing one up when Russia attacked.

Zhora anticipates an escalation in Russia’s cyber aggression — many experts believe far worse is yet to come.

Meantime, donations from the global IT community continue to pour in. A few examples: NameCheap has donated internet domains while Amazon has been generous with cloud services, said Zakharov.
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The Russian war on Ukraine is also happening online, as people share images from around Ukraine. Caught in the middle are U.S. technology firms, which have taken steps to curtail Russian propaganda and make changes for Ukrainians’ safety. But it’s a fine line to walk as VOA’s Michelle Quinn reports.    
Produced by: Matt Dibble  
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Software giant Microsoft announced Friday that it is suspending “all new sales of Microsoft products and services in Russia” over that country’s invasion of Ukraine.

“Like the rest of the world, we are horrified, angered and saddened by the images and news coming from the war in Ukraine and condemn this unjustified, unprovoked and unlawful invasion by Russia,” the company said in a statement.

The company added that it was ‘stopping many aspects of our business in Russia in compliance with governmental sanctions decisions.’

Many companies have announced they are ending or limiting their activity in Russia. Some companies include Apple, Nike and Dell Technologies.

Microsoft added that it will continue to work with Ukraine to protect the country from Russian cyberattacks, noting it already had during an attack on a “major Ukrainian broadcaster.”

“Since the war began, we have acted against Russian positioning, destructive or disruptive measures against more than 20 Ukrainian government, IT and financial sector organizations,” Microsoft said. “We have also acted against cyberattacks targeting several additional civilian sites. We have publicly raised our concerns that these attacks against civilians violate the Geneva Convention.”

Some information in this report comes from Reuters.

 
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A consortium of U.S. states announced on Wednesday a joint investigation into TikTok’s possible harm to young users of the platform, which has boomed in popularity, especially among children. 

Officials across the United States have launched their own investigations and lawsuits against Big Tech giants as new national regulations have failed to pass, partly because of partisan gridlock in Congress. 

The consortium of eight states will look into the harm TikTok can cause to its young users and what the company knew about such possible harm, California Attorney General Rob Bonta said a statement.  

Leading the investigation is a coalition of attorneys general from California, Florida, Kentucky, Massachusetts, Nebraska, New Jersey, Tennessee and Vermont.

The investigation will focus, among other things, on TikTok’s techniques to boost young user engagement, including efforts to increase the frequency and duration of children’s use. 

“We don’t know what social media companies knew about these harms and when,” Bonta said in a statement.  

“Our nationwide investigation will allow us to get much-needed answers and determine if TikTok is violating the law in promoting its platform to young Californians,” he added. 

TikTok’s short-form videos have boomed in popularity with the youngest users, prompting growing concern from parents over the potential that their children could develop unhealthy use habits or be exposed to harmful content. 

TikTok welcomes investigation

The platform welcomed the investigation as a chance to provide information on its efforts to protect users. 

“We care deeply about building an experience that helps to protect and support the well-being of our community,” TikTok’s statement said. 

“We look forward to providing information on the many safety and privacy protections we have for teens,” it added. 

Social media’s impact on young users came under renewed scrutiny last year when Facebook whistleblower Frances Haugen leaked a trove of internal company documents raising questions over whether it had prioritized growth over users’ safety. 

The documents were given to lawmakers, a consortium of journalists and U.S. regulators by Haugen, who has become a figurehead of criticism of the leading social media platform. 

Despite media attention on the issue and hearings before U.S. lawmakers, no new rules have gotten close to being enacted on the national level. 

States have instead proceeded with their own efforts to look into Big Tech companies. 

For example, a consortium of U.S. states announced a joint probe in November of Instagram’s parent company, Meta, for promoting the app to children despite allegedly knowing its potential for harm. The consortium of attorneys general, states’ top law enforcers and legal advisers, included some of the same states as Wednesday’s probe, like California and Florida.

Instagram sparked fierce criticism for its plans to make a version of the photo-sharing app for younger users. It later halted development. 
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